Buzz Archives for August 2003

There is increasing buzz in web designer circles about a petition to Freedom Scientific to produce a free version of their JAWS screen reader so that web designers can test their own web pages. JAWS is the leading screen reader on the market by a wide margin, and as ...

Over at Juicy Studio, Gez Lemon is developing a chart that shows the capabilities of various assistive devices commonly used by others to access web content. Included in this list of devices are JAWS for Windows, WindowEyes, IBM Home Page Reader, pwWebSpeak, and EmacSpeak(linux based).Gez announced the launch via his ...

Much clearer error explanations and a new "fussy parsing" mode are the major new features of the latest W3C Validator Beta release:“The big news in this version is internal support for custom and customizeable error explanations. This means an end to digging all over the net drying to figure out ...

For the People
("Bringing our world together, one voice at a time.") is
a voice chat service that's worth checking out, not least because tomorrow they will be having a presentation by Gary Moulton from Microsoft's accessibility division. You will need to join to take part (and hopefully there's still time to ...

The W3C Working Groups on Wednesday released three new Working Drafts attached to CSS: the CSS3 Presentation Levels Module, meant to aid creation of outlines and slide presentations; the CSS Print Profile, for printing documents on low-cost hardware; and the CSS3 Syntax Module. Developer comments on these ...

In an eloquent radio interview for National Public Radio (NPR), Paul Ford of ftrain describes the evolution of Web standards.
What's especially interesting is that Paul uses descriptions of human language as a metaphor for the merging of various Web standards. He carries the metaphor through very well, and as ...

This is an alternative way to get the message out. Matt Robinsion developed the Wish You Were Here pages : a small site designed to advocate modern web design practice, with tips for web designers. Tips are arranged or grouped in categories from Design(Making your site attractive and ...

Recent Buzz

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality.

When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns “advancing” HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.

In 2001, with the browser wars largely over, WaSP began to shift its focus. While some members continued to work with browser vendors on improving their standards support, others began working closely with software makers like Macromedia to improve the quality of code being authored in tools such as Dreamweaver. And others began the hard slog of educating web designers and developers about the importance of using web standards, culminating in the creation of WaSP InterAct, a web curriculum framework which is now overseen by the W3C.

Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to close down The Web Standards Project.

Many (if not all) of us are continuing to work in the world of web standards, but our work is now largely outside the umbrella of WaSP. If you are interested in continuing to work on web standards-related projects along with us, we humbly suggest you follow these projects:

A List Apart – The magazine “for people who make websites” is run by WaSP founder Jeffrey Zeldman and is a consistent source of forward-thinking articles and tutorials.

HTML5 Doctor – A solid resource and discussion forum on all things HTML5, brought to you by Bruce Lawson and his team.

WebPlatform.org – A fantastic web standards resource, providing up-to-date documentation, Q&As, tutorials & more. Chris Mills, Doug Schepers, and a number of other standards advocates are involved in this project.

Web Standards Sherpa – An educational resource founded by WaSP which continues to operate under the leadership of Chris Casciano, Virginia DeBolt, Aaron Gustafson, and Emily Lewis.

Web Standards + Small Business – An outreach project started by WaSP that educates small businesses about why they should care about web standards. This project is overseen by Aaron Gustafson.

The job’s not over, but instead of being the work of a small activist group, it’s a job for tens of thousands of developers who care about ensuring that the web remains a free, open, interoperable, and accessible competitor to native apps and closed eco-systems. It’s your job now, and we look forward to working with you, and wish you much success.

Nota bene: In the near future, we will be making a permanent, static archive of webstandards.org and some of our other resources like WaSP Interact to preserve them as a resource and to provide a record of our 15-year mission to improve the web.Bruce Lawson and Steph Troeth contributed to this post.